Without taking the luxury of going through 500 comments before me, I'm pretty sure/confident that someone has probably already said anything I could say, but I'll say it anyway. I couldn't care less whether or not linux is competitive, the only thing I care about is whether or not it's viable for personal use. secure/stable/hardware support. In order for Linux to be competitive it would have to gain market share with countless legions of people I couldn't care less about. More succinctly, NONE of the qualities in linux which attracted/drew me towards it, have anything to do with it's profitability, market share, or adoption rate. You could perhaps argue that linux needed to attain a certain -mass- to attract the resources necessary to gain the qualities that I DO care about, but let's just say the necessary mass to do that is far less then it would require to "compete" with microsoft.

Wow - 20 seconds on slashdot and I've already had my first no sense of humor comment. You'll forgive me if I don't use widespread adoption rates as my relative yardstick of a system's quality. Mom and Pop's grocery store may never be Wal-Mart size, but I can't say that bothers me, nor do I intend to stop shopping there, should they refuse to expand. People want to spend cycles debating linux's legitmacy as an OS based on market share? OK - have a good time with that, really. I'll be over here going on with my life.

Wow, I must be totally having an out of body experience, RIGHT NOW, because if I'm not mistaken. I'm actually using a linux desktop. Wait a minute, that can't be true. They're dead...I must be invisible! (runs out into the street....I CAN DO ANYTHING!!!)